As digital noise becomes more and more prevalent, the ability for the average professional to sift through noise and tune into actionable information is critical.

This article walks through the process to create a straight-forward social media dashboard that can be used as a daily social media training and social business engagement tool. Your social media dashboard will help you monitor profiles and keywords on services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

With a few of these working in your favor, you will always have insight to the most recent topics covering your business.

Suggested uses for creating your first social media dashboard:

Topic Based: create an insight to your current work project

Education Based: track future topics to stay up-to-date

Team Based: share info to help project expertise and market changes

Competitive Based: monitor companies, executives, or work teams

Getting Started: Understanding Paper.li

Paper.li is a platform that collects social data from popular social sites. It is entirely web based and provides a decent set of tools for prioritizing your information into proper categories. It has a built-in algorithm that ranks how popular each piece of content is and a layout format that presents everything in an easy to browse format.

Paper.li is entirely free. You can create up to 10 different social media dashboards using built-in Facebook and Twitter integration.

Step One: What is your topic?

This is pretty simple. Choose a few top speakers, keywords, product names or #hashtags.

For this example I’m going to describe how I made my “Competitive Intelligence Report”

Paper.li has the ability to sort content from these fields:

Single Twitter User

You and the People You Follow

Twitter Lists

Twitter #hashtags

Keywords on Twitter

Keywords on Facebook

RSS Feeds

Single Goolge+ User

Keywords on Google+

It is important to note that you can use multiple sets, so for the example of my ‘Competitive Intelligence Report’ I have used three different Twitter profiles, a Twitter list, a Twitter Hashtag, keywords on both Twitter and Facebook, and several keywords on Google+

Most of the choices also offer the ability to filter the information using Boolean search parameters

include all of these keywords

this exact phrase

any of these words

none of these words

Step Two: Who is going to read it?

When you are creating your profile and keyword lists for item one, keep in mind that you have an audience wants to consume and share the information.

As time goes on you will want to consider who/what/when/where/why these individuals are reading it.

Step Three: Where am I going to display it?

Most of my Paper.li social media dashboards are shared on Twitter. Because I know my readers are active on certain keywords I can relate to important #hashtags in the titles of Tweets that reference my dashboard. In my Competitive Intelligence Report #BI, I know #BI is a key hashtag for business intelligence professionals.

Paper.li gives you some simple choices for display content, the most useful are

auto-publish the updates on a daily or weekly basis to your Twitter followers

embed your new social media dashboard on a public or private webpage (see example below)

Step Four: Stats and Usage = Adaptation

The key of ‘is it useful’ can be seen in the stats.

As of 4/9/12 the Competitive Intelligence Today #BI report has been Tweeted 69k times, and shared 230 times on Linkedin.

I’ve gone back several times into Step One to revisit my lists, keywords, and Boolean search operators.

Step Five: Create a few, share with colleagues

I have a few fairly popular social media dashboards created with Paper.li